Facebook like platform for applications

Question

I'm developing a CMS for my university. With this Cms university staff can login and design their personal web sites without any knowledge of html or php.

What i want is sperate all external applications from my CMS. For example, there is a Polls application, Gallery and Images application and so on. And others programmers will work on this.

I have to write a application platform and all other programmers will use the platform's rules and write their modules (applications).

Please offer me some solutions. I know there is nothing about the code yet. I have to think about the design pattern.

EDIT: ok, forget about the word "CMS" put "Program" instead of it. "I'm writing a PHP program which must have the ability to extend with other applications".

Answer 1

Why don't you use an existing product and just customise it/write any plugins you need. Something like Joomla or Zope/Plone.

Answer 2

Checkout Apache Shindig http://shindig.apache.org/ and OpenSocial http://www.opensocial.org/... You can add a few specific APIs and it would allow others a stable platform to easily extend...